Galliano's Glorious Reign

On John Galliano's 10th anniversary at Christian Dior, Bazaar presents one dazzling creation from each of his 20 couture collections

Ten years ago, John Galliano, the media's favorite "punk" designer, was ushered into the imposing dove-gray-and-gilt Grand Salon at the House of Dior on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, where wave after wave of employees — 800 in all — filed in to meet him for the first time. "I can remember only two things from that day," says Galliano, crow-black eyes widening. "First, that I desperately wanted to remember everybody's name, and second, that I kept thinking, What have I done?"

A technical point: Galliano was never strictly a punk, though he admits to "probably wearing pajamas and a garbage collector's jacket" when he first arrived in Paris in 1990. His friend and collaborator Sam McKnight, a hairdresser who knew him in the early clubbing days in London, describes him as "more swashbuckling. He's too polite to be a punk. I think there's a bit of Tyrone Power in him."

And perfectionism. British milliner Stephen Jones walked into Galliano's studio in Paris one day early in his career to find one of his team members, says Jones, "at the designer's direction, throwing red wine onto some gorgeous cream satin to work out the right shade of pink, fabulous pink."

This is the passion the public craves from design divas. It's even better if said divas can singlehandedly revive the bias cut (slicing against the grain of fabric, which Galliano stumbled across when he was researching Vionnet and which he has likened to working with oily water) and launch a zillion little slipdresses in the process. "If I've achieved anything," he muses, "I hope I've rescued women from wearing a naff dirndl skirt and corset at night."

Technical wizardry and Tyrone Power notwithstanding, the high anxiety reverberating across Paris on the day of Galliano's appointment to Dior in 1996 was all too real — a state of affairs not improved by his reputation for sending terse instructions to his atelier ("Tighter, smaller, tighter, smaller"). However, the Dior staff adored him. "One of the seamstresses later said that I taught her to see things in a modern way, which I found really touching," he says.

"The thing about John," says photographer Nick Knight, "is that he's not confrontational. He doesn't set out to be iconoclastic or rebellious. He just happens to see the world in a different way from everyone else."

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Though previously known for standing apart from the mainstream, the designer quickly got down to the business of minting commercial hits at Dior, including the wildly popular Saddle bag, introduced in 2000. On a roll, Galliano and Bernard Arnault, the ever-vigilant chairman of both the Christian Dior Group and LVMH, went on a mission to respond to the market. "I had to learn to cater to the Miami set, the Asian sector, the bar-mitzvah ladies, and put it on a runway so that it looked coherent," says Galliano. Paradoxically, he pulled it off by pushing the shows, particularly haute couture, to the limits of what constitutes fashion: inflated proportions, hyperextended heels, surreal, false-eyelash-on-the-cheek makeup, models dressed as topiaries. The runway shows, together with the narrative images he and Knight created for the ad campaigns, thrust Dior into the center of a white-hot, sex-obsessed, blinged-up zeitgeist and sent profits soaring.

Simon Procter

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Then came the infamous "clochards" (tramps) collection for Dior Haute Couture in 2000. Picture Erin O'Connor in a $20,000 evening dress that looked as if it had been made from old newspaper. Then picture the French public, gleefully encouraged by the press, storming the Dior flagship store and headquarters in protest of Galliano's hijacking "the homeless look" for women with clothes budgets the size of a small welfare state. Galliano, en route to work in a limo, was rung up by his office and warned to keep his driver circling the block until the mob calmed down. "I think some of them were just kids having fun," he says. "I remember they wore great Adidas trainers."

He laughs now, but things weren't pretty at the time. Here was a designer who had been set the not inconsequential task of rescuing the house of Dior — a sleeping beauty that had become a tangle of licenses that were increasingly creatively bankrupt — bringing it to the brink of riot. The Marie Antoinette moment was the point at which Galliano should have imploded, if only because that's what genius does. But here he is, seven years later, perched across some dainty china cups of Earl Grey from me. (Actually, I'm sitting and he's lying, mock-Freudian-couch-style, across a sofa in his office, a typically Galliano-esque melee of chandeliers, a stripped-back brick wall, Brazilian music, and wall-to-wall mirrors.) The artist looks, it must be said, neither burned out nor impoverished, although the piratical outfit is slightly unconventional, even for a designer. But the one time he looked fairly conventional, when he went to Buckingham Palace in 2001 in a bland Brioni suit (without a shirt) to receive a Commander of the British Empire award from the queen, the band struck up the chorus of "Hello, Dolly" in his honor. "Conventional" isn't his look.

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Creatively (which was to be expected) and commercially (which wasn't), Galliano has been the most successful designer at the house since M. Christian Dior himself. Even the newsprint pattern became a money spinner. There have been a few misfires — he thinks his Casati women in 1998 (based on the notorious, eccentric European socialite and artist from the '20s) were too literal — and reviews for his recent spring ready-to-wear collection were muted. The suits were beautifully cut, but the presentation was almost shockingly tame. Galliano, who studies all his reviews, shrugs, as only a man who has seen the sales figures can. (Dior's fashion revenues more than tripled between 1998 and 2005.) "If people say that that collection was for the Dior accountants ... well, designers need accountants. And accountants need designers."

Simon Procter

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Galliano promises that for his 10th anniversary — and the house's 60th — normal service will be resumed. A spectacular is in the cards. "It's definitely a challenge to be in one of John's shows," deadpans British model Erin O'Connor, who over nine years has played Nefertiti in 25 pounds of gold, M. Dior's mother in an 18-inch corset (while she was being laced into it, the horse pulling her carriage was given a tranquilizer shot), Salvador Dalí, and Martha Graham. "You learn all the time," says O'Connor, "but for all his knowledge, he brings incredible lightness and fun." His fashion vision has become increasingly extreme, a world away from the lyrical, poetic Mary Shelleys and Blanche DuBoises of his early collections for Dior, in which sensuality rather than overt sexuality was the rule. "Times are different," he says without sentiment. "Sex sells. I wasn't trying to market a brand when I started."

In some ways Galliano can't win: Too theatrical and he's accused of irrelevant historicism ("Everything you see in the ready-to-wear shows is sold in one form or another," he counters); too restrained and his audience is disappointed. "People almost don't want to like him sometimes," says O'Connor, referring to critics and competitors, "but they end up being charmed. He's so demure and unbelievably shy."

Not on the runway, of course, where his flamboyant appearances — dressed to match his collections, variously as a conquistador, a Howard Hughes–type character, and, more recently, a cosmonaut — have become one of the sights of the season. Though he used to be the poster boy for all-night partying, Galliano now keeps to a 13-hour-a-week keep-fit habit, with trainers for weights, boxing, and aerobics. (He even runs on Christmas day.) His eating patterns have acquired a scientific reverence: slow-burning carbs leading up to a show when he's doing as many as 40 fittings a day. "I'm responsible for 800 people's mortgages and 15 collections a year," he retorts. "You bet I train like an athlete."

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The dressing up may teeter into farce, but it's one directed by Galliano with formidable focus. Howard Tangye, one of his tutors at Central Saint Martins College in London, remembers that he "turned up for class in a suit that looked like a bank manager's when everyone was dressed like a hippie. Even then, there was always a crowd of students waiting for him." His friend Camilla Morton, an author and journalist, likens him to the Wizard of Oz. "There's all this craziness around John, but at the center of it he's very normal and grounded," says Morton, "still addicted to trash British soaps."

For a man who once sparked a riot, it sounds disarmingly homey. Galliano chuckles at the apparent contradiction, because for him, there isn't one. "God knows, I wouldn't want to be that lunatic in the cosmonaut's outfit in real life," he snorts. "That's John Galliano the designer. And I'm John Galliano the man." The zaniest man in fashion might just be its sanest.

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